CLIFFSIDE PARK — For many, the foot of snow that fell this weekend was a nuisance to be shoveled, or an excuse to stay inside. For Carlos Aldo Martins, who was hard at work in front of his Anderson Avenue apartment on Saturday, it was a blank canvas.

A 12-foot lioness, lording over a freshly-killed deer, sat sculpted out of snow. Martins paced around it, scraping away millimeters at a time with a metal spoon, smoothing her sides with a trowel. Neighbors stopped to snap photos with their phones and cars honked as he waved back, putting on the finishing touches.

"It came from my imagination," he said. Martins said he started in the late night hours on Friday, rising at 5 a.m. to continue working on the lioness, based on images he downloaded and printed out off the Internet. All told, he figures he spent about 20 hours on it.

Martins, whose trade is construction, is accustomed to working with marble and granite, but said said he started sculpting as a kid in Brazil, making likenesses out of sand and clay. Snow is a new medium, though, and he got off to an ambitious start last winter, wowing his neighbors with a life-sized horse, glistening with a glaze of ice.

Carlos Aldo Martins puts some finishing touches on a lioness he sculpted out of snow in front of his Anderson Avenue apartment. S.P. Sullivan/NJ.com

"With snow, you have to have patience," he said. Next snowfall, he has plans to head into Manhattan, he said, to make a giant eagle of record-breaking proportions.

"When I go to Times Square, I'm going to get in the Guinness Book," he said.

Summers you can catch him on the beaches of the Jersey Shore, making sand sculptures in competitions or for his own amusement. Though there's something to be said about making art right on your doorstep, where you keep an eye on it.

"In the summer, when I have to leave the beach, I'm crying, 'I don't want to leave my baby,'" he said.